MLB.com's Carrie Muskat has been covering Major League Baseball since 1981 and is the author of "Banks to Sandberg to Grace: Five Decades of Love and Frustration with the Cubs." You can follow her on Twitter @CarrieMuskat. Here, she blogs about the Cubs.

7/31 Saying no to the Dodgers

Ryan Dempster had made it clear he wanted to play for the Dodgers but the Cubs couldn’t come up with a deal that worked for both sides.

“Two teams have to agree on a value to make a trade, and I guess we never got to that point,” GM Jed Hoyer said. “It’s no fault of theirs, it’s no fault of ours. That’s why trades are hard to make. You assume when you pick up the phone to call a team, most trades don’t work out because people value things differently. We could never get to the right place together. It wasn’t for lack of phone minutes, that’s for sure.”

When told the Cubs and Dodgers couldn’t agree, Dempster gave Hoyer the go-ahead to talk to other teams.

“Once the Dodgers were out, there were two teams that got in on it and the Rangers moved really fast,” Dempster said. “They obviously have a very good team and I’m going to go down there and hopefully be a small piece of what they have going there. They’re in first place and proven winners the last couple years. I’m going to go down there and hopefully sneak in the back door and try to blend in and do my job when asked to do my job.”

Said Dodgers GM Ned Colletti: “We made a game effort. We did the right thing. It doesn’t preclude us doing something later. They wanted not just one prime prospect, plus other people, too. We decided we’re going to pass on that and move on.”

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